FEW would remember him now but I was reminded of him while leafing through a book of modern verse by the nephew of a poet who lives in the UAE and by virtue of being an expatriate also remits rhymes to Pakistan. This petro-poetry, if you please, makes little sense to me try as I might unravel the logical connection of one line to the other and of one image to the next. How can a jackal’s teeth chatter in the eye of the burning sun and the hills of Arabia crumble in a black ashtray is beyond my rupee- fed intellect. But it does bring back forgotten images from the past.

A disturbed man who disturbed no one, he made strange incomprehensible rhymes that he wrote down on long sheets of lined paper and kept them rolled up in the tattered pockets of his long discoloured coat under which he wore nothing, neither vest nor shirt, all through winter, summer and spring.

On Sunday mornings he would hover around the Vogue’s Cafe in Saddar, which remained the haunt of Rawalpindi’s literary people up until the late sixties. Rarely would he come inside unless invited by someone to have a cup of tea. He preferred to stand outside under the Shisham tree to watch people come and go nonchalantly. He seldom spoke to anyone. The only time I heard him say a word was when he handed me a sheaf of papers that bore the latest labours of his poetic imagination. He smiled gently as if doing me a favour. Read it, he said, and walked away.

He wrote with a firm even hand forming his letters with some deliberation. But what he wrote was a jumble of words apparently unrelated to the title. When a line seemed to sparkle with suggestion, it was blunted by words in the next line that belonged to quite a different class of experience. Perhaps to gather his bits into a neat pile, to give shape to what he was trying to communicate, he sought to rhyme his lines. That resulted in a bizarre effect, the absurd